Tag Archives: Slow food movement

Born from disillusionment with our leaders’ inability to instigate anything better than terminal-trajectorial neoliberalism, and a fragment of a vision that I need others to help grow, The Green Cloth Collective emerges as a little-but-already-hundred-and-something-strong guerilla professional network. It is the peer group I longed for, and leftish clothmakers, other craftspeople, businesspeople, activists and economists across continents informally but informedly and animatedly chew over the advantages and opportunities of makership; the problems of race-to-the-bottom economies; and sustainable, communitarian alternatives.

It’s an amazing feeling when you throw an idea out and someone else instantly enacts it, as with the new group reading list (thanks Laurie), or when there’s friction and somebody else deals with it (thanks ladies), or when you’ve half an idea and someone else runs with it (thanks all active members).

Sensible and harebrained proposals so far include:

Green Cloth Allotments: the Green Cloth community could add its little elbow to help save threatened/encourage the creation of new allotments on which (otherwise landless) growers might plant dye gardens and baste fibre plants, perhaps to be sent to a co-operatively owned Green Cloth Mill for processing

The Green Cloth Book of Postcards: in which we all photograph our craft with a relevant political idea (I’ve just made a handful of my own which are for sale singly or in sets in my shop)

The Green Cloth Calendar: in which we all model the garments we’ve made from scratch for ourselves [Tallula’s idea]. Assuming we’d be scantily clad (since most of of us might only have made scarves or equivalent): as well as having a saucy selling point, it would make an incisive point about our current lack of self-sufficiency in being able to clothe ourselves

The Green Cloth Camp: an informal skillswap gathering, perhaps annual (for all aspects of clothmaking and other domestic/rural/survival skills and crafts)

The Green Cloth Certification: a stamp verifying a business model based on an anarcho-syndicalist (probably) producerist economics for the common good (which might just be a posey way of referring to a green co-operative that shouts its politics from the rooftop)

The Green Cloth Circus: a horsedrawn caravan of wagon-dwelling craftspeople [Sue’s idea] on a campaign trail setting up miniature Green Cloth Fairs (see below), including performance textiles, talks, demos and workshops, on common land, village greens, roundabouts, and at political rallies, festivals and such, highlighting the importance of making and the maker’s role in an economics for the common good

The Green Cloth Charter: a statement of values, vision and aims as they crystallise with the community’s development

The Green Cloth Code: the Green Cross Code with a speech impediment or two

The Green Cloth Co-operative: a network of nettlers harvesting and processing wild fibre to be sent to the Green Cloth Mill for spinning, and then sent out to a community of (self-employed?) weavers, before being sold as cloth by the mill

The Green Cloth Council: for if we need a formal steering group, although horizontalist values may not permit anything but an informal cluster of emergent, and possibly transient, ‘elders’

The Green Cloth Currency: on the basis that the current system of (debt based) money creation results in a distorted and extremely unfair market, could the Green Cloth community devise its own monetary or exchange system that would serve as the neutrally useful tool of the commons that currency should be (a Green Cloth Bank or banker(s)/accountant(s) would be paid service charges, not interest, credited with either goods or currency)

The Green Cloth Database: a spreadsheet of makers which would serve, among other things, to facilitate barter [Richard Toogood’s idea]

The Green Cloth Fair: like a gypsy woodfair (and definitely in a field, wilderness or woods) but for cloth people and other makers concerned about an economics for the common good, with trading, eco-conferencing, foodsharing and musicmaking

The Green Cloth Guerillas: where I’ll go if I get frustrated with conservatism or naysaying in the bigger Green Cloth crowd and have to form an uncompromising splinter group (no sign of that yet, I’m glad to say)

The Green Cloth Guild: a formalised version of the Green Cloth Collective, offering support, advice and opportunities to members. A union for the 21st century.

The Green Cloth school of thought: [Stretching it a bit here even for me. Though who knows where the fantasy could go and how the micro-movement might grow…] maker-resister- and artisan-activist-devised economics for the common good

The Kinetic Nettle Knicker Knitting Kolectif: apparently there are simple man-powered Victorian underwear knitting machines, and some form of these kinetic knitting machines can even be powered by a clock and left to work for you. [I think all of us at the recent skillswap camp can take credit/blame for the K5 idea]